Blazers and ties, classes set strictly by ability and pupils drilled to stand when a teacher enters – presumably before launching into a perfect recitation of their times tables. One imagines this is the stuff Nick Gibb dreams of.

If there is one politician who has been most closely associated with the Tories' pledged return to old-fashioned discipline and traditional learning, it is the new schools minister. His stance is likely to put Gibb on a collision course with quite a few teachers. "An unreconstructed 1950s grammar school agenda" is how one leading educationist describes his views. "There's concern about his understanding of what a 21st-century curriculum should look like," says another.

The mainly state-educated MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton favours rote learning, thinks children should know the map of Europe – "it's the routine bits of knowledge that set you up for later life" – and believes teachers should have the power to hand out on-the-spot detentions to be served on the same day, even if they disrupt students' and parents' plans. The disappointment would rightly add to the punishment, he reckons.

But while Gibb has been an enthusiastic proponent of a crackdown on behaviour, he has given equal emphasis to the Conservatives' pledge to let heads get on with running their schools the way they want, unhindered by meddling from central government. Many in the sector have highlighted the tension between the two standpoints.

Gibb attributes much of his thinking on education to his own experiences in the system, moving schools frequently as the family followed his father, a civil engineer, around the country. Aside from a brief spell at an independent school in Bedford and another period in the Canadian state system, his was a state education, encompassing Maidstone grammar, Roundhay high school in Leeds, which had just gone comprehensive, and a comprehensive sixth form, Thornes House, in Wakefield.

Maidstone, he thinks, was the best. "What was good about it was that it was rigorous," he told Teachers TV in 2006. "Every lesson was rigorous, even things like music: it was taught in the same way as chemistry." Wakefield, by contrast, was "terrible": "There was no rigour there. I remember seeing a girl in the library aged about 15 reading an Enid Blyton novel and I thought to myself – aged 17 – 'this is sad, I was reading those books when I was nine'."

It was in 1974, the year a February election produced a hung parliament and the Liberals' Jeremy Thorpe failed to reach agreement on a coalition with Edward Heath, that Gibb's interest in politics was first awakened. ("I knew somehow I was a Conservative," he says.) By the sixth form he had decided it was the career for him. On leaving school he took a job as a handyman in a London hotel, spending his evenings in the House of Commons watching late-night debates from the public gallery.

He would not make it there as an MP until 1997, first reading law at Durham and then working as a chartered accountant specialising in corporate taxation, latterly with KPMG. But his political life before election included acting as an aide to Cecil Parkinson in the 1987 general election. Once in the Commons he was quick to make his mark, becoming a frontbench spokesman on trade and industry matters in 1999, and later speaking on Treasury issues. He has served as a shadow minister for education since May 2005.

Gibb says he favours traditional methods simply because they work. And for all the criticism he is likely to face, he will always have at least one key supporter from the world of education. His mother, Eileen, a retired primary teacher with 38 years' experience, has frequently been found sitting at the back of the room as he addresses fringe meetings at party conferences.